I Used THIS App to See How I Spent Money in 2023 - Year End Review

whenever I start a new year I always go back and take a look at what the previous year looked like so I can make better smarter financial decisions in this video we're going to be doing an audit a year-end review of my spending in 2023 using the quick and simplify budgeting app and there were a lot of surprises hey guys it's Justine your host of the de free Millennials YouTube channel here we talk about all ways to help you achieve Financial confidence Crush debt that leads to more fun of fewer payments if you're into that LIF cell be sure you hit that red subscribe button we're growing this channel to over 100,000 subscribers and I'm so thankful for today's sponsor quick and simplify I've actually been using simplify on and off for the past few years and I have to say the last few years have just been a GameChanger of what they're creating inhouse constantly making improvements on this budgeting app if you've been following my channel for a long time then you know I'm an avid spreadsheet user and the value that that I see with budgeting apps is so great because it can quickly pull the data and the reporting for you there's not a lot of manual entry or adjustments that you have to make like you would with a spreadsheet so if you're like ah just seeing I don't want to use a spreadsheet quick and simplifies as your answer and right now they have a really juicy offer for mint users who are coming over importing their transactions from M into quick and simplify you can test ride quick and simplify for the entire year for free without further Ado let's go ahead and get into one of the best features I saw of this app that can really help you understand your spending when you log into your app whether you're using this on a mobile device or your laptop you're going to go over to the report section and then what I've been doing is for the date range I'm going into last year apply dates and then the breakdown is by category you can also break this down by pay or tags or anything like that I found by category was really helpful for me to just understand where my money was going last year so you can see home was a major expense obviously my rent is included in that but also things like groceries utilities kid related expenses dining and drinks everything else and if you pop that open you can click into any of those categories and then they're going to break it down into subcategories so 10k of everything else I'm like what the heck is that it can quickly show me okay you spent close to $3,000 on auto and transportation costs $1,900 on entertainment so if I click on auto and transport it's actually going to break that down even further and show me how much I spent on gas and fuel car insurance parking related expenses service and parts really $ 13 almost $1,400 in gas so if there's anything that you see that you're like that actually is not accurate it's actually going to show you what that expense was based off of your credit card statement if you're pulling this over from a credit card transaction and then if you're like oh this was a work rated expense for example Kyle puts a lot of work rated expenses on our personal card so that we can get the points Point hack tip for you there you can actually exclude this from your spending and your reporting so that you can get a more accurate picture that was only $4.7 so I don't think that's really going to move the needle there but it helps you just parse out different transactions especially if you're using your personal card for work related expenses you want to go in and make those adjustments you can hide those transactions inside of your uh spending reports and if you see that for multiple like if I was to do okay Speedway and kico these were let's say they were work rated uh transactions you can select multiple transactions here and then I can go up and hit this little little pencil icon hit edit transactions and then here's how you're going to do it you hit exclusion and then exclude from your spending plan and your reports and then apply so that's how that works let me go back up and take a look at the rest of my categories cuz this truly is what I spent last year so for groceries if I know it's 8525 for all of the transactions that I've done and then you can just go through and and take a look is this truly accurate Ralph's Whole Foods Costco Ralph's Ralph's Costco yeah this looks like they're pulling the the right transactions and guess what they automatically categorize these expenses for me so I didn't have to manually go in and hit groceries if for some reason they didn't get this Ralph's categorized correctly you can always go in here and hit the category and Mark it as a different category and you can create a rule for future transactions and it's also applied to previous transactions which I really really love that's what makes this app timesaving because you are able to categorize those transactions really quickly so if I know that my grocery budget was around 8525 let's just take a look at that 8525 divided 12 then that's around $700 per month that I'm spending on groceries here's how this helps you when you take a look at your previous spending for the year is now I know that $710 is what I'm averaging and if I was trying to budget for a $500 grocery monthly grocery budget I'm probably going to go over that because realistically this is what I'm spending also a tip here if you're like oh my gosh $700 on groceries are you kidding me that's way too much then I can baby step that down so maybe $500 per month on grocery spending isn't realistic right for me right now because I'm spending $200 over that let's baby step it by saying all right my new goal is I'm going to hit $675 for my grocery budget then I can go over to my spending plan the spending plan is basically your monthly budget template this is what you're going to be working off of so you can actually do this for this month you can actually scroll through to February March which I love you can actually go into the future and make adjustments and then what you're going to do is you're going to hit after your income after bills and savings so this is your income minus your bills minus your subscriptions you're going to go into planned spending and what I have after all of my bills and saving I have 5200 available minus the 3760 that I've already got planned so let's go over to groceries you can already see I have it updated for $700 but let's say for this month and I've already spent $38.70 I love that they already tell you how much you spent so no mental math no math gymnastics that you have to do it's already told me how much I've spent if I want to adjust this to that new goal of 675 I just update it here and then I can see exactly how much money is left I have $336 left in the month I'm about halfway through the month now let's divide that by another two weeks so I've about $168 per week is what I can spend on groceries and I'm typically trying to go to the grocery store once a week to make things easy for meal planning purposes I know food for a lot of us has been a budget breaker lately not just groceries but also restaurants and this is one way that you can keep things realistic by taking a look at those spending reports and then updating your spending plan based off of the data that's what's amazing about it so if I'm I'm going to go back to the report and again last year apply dates restaurants was $4500 are you kidding me now here's the thing for me and I don't know about you but whenever I'm going out to eat when I'm traveling to me travel eating out comes from my travel budget so what I can do is I know for sure fireworks hero 88 por house blind box all of that good stuff these are places that we went to out to eat while we were on travel so again you just highlight those transactions and then let's do this exclusion from the report apply and now it's grade out so you can go back and forth through each of these transactions if you really like here again I see top of Vancouver this was definitely Standard Station all of those ones I can hide so exclusion hide from the report report boom and the reason why I'm hiding that is because that money actually came out of my vacation savings account and I don't want to count it as like restaurant spending that I was doing as part of just my day-to-day routine but anyway you can see $4,200 it's still a lot of money 4273 divided by 12 $356 per month is what I was spending on restaurants actually that's not too far off from what I typically allocate for my spending plans if I go back to plan spending and take a look at my restaurant budget it's $300 but they're averaging ooh this is really interesting see they already did it for me the average over the last 6 months is $357 so I could actually edit this expense to do 350 and again it's already telling me I've spent close to $200 on restaurants this month and actually this one these two restaurant expenditures were from us traveling to San Diego so here's where I can just exclude it from the report and then I can also exclude it from the spend plan there we go hey look at that so things are going to adjust as you adjust uh your spending plan and your reporting one other note that I want to want you to be aware of when it comes to taking a look at your spending reflecting for the Year this is such a great way to just watch problem areas so anytime you're feeling like oh I've been spending way too much on groceries are been spending way too much at on purchases at Target you can actually create watch list for yourself and simplify is going to keep track of how much you've been spending in that particular area to create more awareness so I've already set this up for looks looks like the nom nom nom nom nom nom dinner dining and drinks okay so anything that was related to restaurant spending is included there I've got my Amazon purchases which I'm really trying to cut back on and this says that I've already spent $32 my monthly average is $272 and I know that average is going up because I typically spend a lot of money um during Christmas time at Amazon so if you wanted to create a watch list based off of your spending report of what you were seeing you can do this by category pay tag so if I was going to do pay I'm going to do Target and let's do something fun just a make things fun right Target and then I'm going to do I'm going to search for it here it is and I'll do target.com too and then ooh I can set a Target amount of how much I want to spend or I can just simply create the the tracker the watch list without creating a Target amount so let's hit that created my target watch list and there it is oh and I love this because it's already showing me my monthly average over the last 12 months I spent around $200 $123 in Target transactions so what's cool about the reporting features you can click open that watch list and then it's going to show you exactly how much money you spent at Target every single time at September wow actually was really good in September I didn't spend any money at Target and then you're going to take a look at all of your transaction history by clicking on the month there we go so so then you can go through and see exactly what happened within that particular month now keep in mind if you're anything like me when you go to Target you are typically doing um clothing shopping makeup shopping grocery shopping so here's where you can actually go in and split your transaction which I love so let's say $100 of this and it's automatically going to adjust that $100 of this went to groceries so then you can automatically update that update it and then you can see the split and how it actually deducts it from what that that total cost was for the month of May this just helps you do your plan spending so much faster because you already have the data it's already going to pull all of that reporting for you now I taking a look at it from a Year's glance and you can also take a look at the last three months I do this all the time for my spending audits is encourage my coaching clients to take a look at the last 3 months of spending this is a really simple way for you to quickly get that information so that I can move forward with how you are going to be progressing with your financial Journey this year quick and simplify has been named the best budgeting app by the New York Times wire cutter and the best personal finance app from PC mag if you are wanting to utilize a budget app if you're wanting to do a hybrid approach with a spreadsheet and an app Quick and simplifies your solution did I mention that M users get a 12mon free trial run if they import their transactions over the cool thing about quick and simplify is it's a subscription model so yes you're paying for the app and well you're not paying for it if if you're a Mt user right now so best click on that deal below the cool thing about their subscription model you're not getting hit up by some Financial brokerage firm or service sales thing none of that gimmicky salesy stuff is happening inside of this app because it's truly you and your data which I love so if you want to check that out be sure to click the link below thank you so much quick and simplify for sponsoring this video If you like this one give it a big thumbs up and I'll catch you in the next [Music] one [Music] oh